Highlights: 10 - 16 June, 2024

New Art Highlights of the week includes: Jennifer Allan, Susan Eyre, Lauren McLaughlin and rob birch

Lumps in the Sauce, 2019

Jennifer Allan

A memory of a regular and typical histrionic enactment during dinner. The bird and advancing topiary are harbingers of further imminent overwhelming impingement requiring normalisation.

127x97cm

Azimuth Obelisk (of sedimentary knowledge), 2022 - 2023

Susan Eyre

The Azimuth Obelisk (of sedimentary knowledge) is a reimagining of the concrete ‘obelisk’ erected at Hartland Magnetic Observatory in the late 1950's as a permanent azimuth mark from which the drift of the magnetic north pole is monitored via a theodolite through the north facing window of The Absolute Hut. Made from hundreds of hand torn reclaimed prints and drawings, this sculpture embodies the passage of time through a process of layering, holding the history of past works embedded within the stacked layers much as the Earth’s geological and magnetic history is secreted into the strata of sedimentary rock. The base is cast in non-magnetic Snowcrete mixed with crushed oyster shells and the pyramidion is made from patinated copper, all materials used in the buildings and architecture of a magnetic observatory. 

30x30x270cm

A Conflict of Interests, 2012 - 2016 

Lauren McLaughlin

A conflict of interests is a typographical work whereby the words "Mother" "other" "her" and "Me" flash consecutively and continuously as a visual representation of the identity conflicts women experience in matrescence.

I made the work in response to my own experience as a young single mother navigating the changes within my sense of self as I became a woman, and the struggle to balance my own needs and desires with those of my child. The work aimed to present a maternal subjectivity, reclaiming the objectification of the maternal identity. Neon is a very male-dominated medium and this piece was partly inspired and produced in response to Martin Creed's 'Mothers' (2011) which I felt was another attempt to glorify motherhood from a patriarchal perspective.

PAUL NEUMAN, 2024

rob birch

We must abandon the sovereign notion of self. That is to say, the self that comes from the centralised governing paradigm of bourgeois thinking. One of desire and intensity, the rapture of consumption, the Sadio-masochistic thrill of inequality, and the addictive engagement of the identity project in the forlorn and disastrous belief that things will get better. We have two options. To give in, creating a “product” that everybody gets but nobody wants, or we can seek the notion of self from the post-apocalypse, the post-human. A shared experience of radical identity politics that prioritises poiesis over techne. What we know to be true over what we are told is true.

My work is a collage-based visual enquiry into an unrecorded, working-class notion of self. I use the open grammar of collage and the potential of the digital to provide a progressive form of identity politics that advances the cause of a post-human expression of self.

100x120cms